When police officers are sued for corruption or brutality — and when, as more frequently happens, the case is settled — it is almost always the city that employs them that picks up the tab for the damages awarded. This may be changing, with the focus now on events in Baltimore.

BALTIMORE – As the Baltimore Police Department currently sits front and center in a massive corruption trial, talk of having individual police officers be fiscally responsible for the lawsuits against them is making the rounds.

Coming from a man who was literally kept off the judge’s bench for being too racist, serving an administration staffed with unrepentant ideological bigots and ‘white nationalists,’ there is no mistaking what Jeff Sessions’ message to the sheriffs really says.

WASHINGTON – U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions addressed a meeting of the National Sheriff’s Association on February 12 in Washington. As the nation’s chief law enforcer, Sessions was “among friends” and such an appearance should have been uneventful. What could possibly go wrong? Well … it appears that the Attorney General may

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA – Last month a video emerged of a La Mesa police officer violently slamming a 17-year-old student onto the ground at a San Diego charter school. The juvenile, who had complained of feeling ill,

The choice to invest in punitive systems instead of stabilizing and nourishing ones does not make our communities safer. A living wage, access to holistic health services and treatment, educational opportunity, and stable housing are more successful in reducing crime than more police or prisons.

NEW YORK – A couple of weeks ago ProPublica noted that 2017’s murder rate in New York City was down to 291, the lowest since the 1950s. That number is noteworthy in and of itself, but also because of the context in which it occurred:

Pressing for hate-crime or federal civil rights violations in the deaths of unarmed black people by police is somewhat of a staple in the arsenal of police-brutality activists. Unfortunately the track record of success is all but nonexistent.

Erica Garner never stopped fighting for justice for her father Eric, who was killed by an NYPD officer with an illegal chokehold in 2014. The 27-year-old -- who passed away at the end of December last year -- led

LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY – Todd Shaw, the former assistant police chief of the city of Prospect, Kentucky, resigned November 20, 2017, after more than 20 years on the job. Shaw quit after Prospect’s Chief of Police Jeff Sherrard confronted him with copies of Facebook messages sent to a Louisville Metropolitan Police Department (LMPD)

Civil liberties groups have decried the expansion of warrantless surveillance, saying that it violates Americans’ rights to privacy, creates an end-run around the Fourth Amendment, and may be subject to politically motivated abuse.

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Senate has quietly voted to give intelligence agencies the permission to conduct warrantless surveillance on U.S. citizens for an additional five years.
Senators took a vote on Tuesday of this week to end debate on a bill, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), that allows the